The Digital Economy and Society (DE) Ministry is collaborating with global social platform providers to help create best practices and handle information on social media.
The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) Telecommunications and Information forum in Bangkok, hosted by the DE Ministry recently, was joined by social media giants Facebook, Google and Line.
The move aims to deal with increasingly sophisticated use of social media platforms that now have more than 2.4 billion users globally.
"All related parties need to create joint international principles as best practices for building up social governance in the long term and create awareness among Apec members for both opportunities and threats," said Kajit Sukhum, inspector-general of the DE Ministry.
Apec has an important role in building up social and digital governance as social networks in the region have 1.2 billion users, half of the total globally.
Some giant social platform providers are also corporates in Apec.
Mr Kajit said regulation of social networks has yet to be realised properly.
The ministry does not control, but rather promotes the accuracy of information provided so it won't harm society, he said.
The ministry is in the process of implementing six related digital economy laws. Additionally, the government is building up the digital literacy of people nationwide in tandem with the government's national broadband network construction or Net Pracharat project.
Sheen Handoo, public policy manager of Facebook Asia-Pacific, said Facebook has 2.3 billion users worldwide. The company has an operational policy called a community standard that governs usage on the platform.
Facebook has invested in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning as well as hired 30,000 skilled staff globally to monitor the network 24 hours daily to ensure no content violates the nine categories of community standards, including hate speech.
Jake Lucchi, head of content, AI and public policy for Google in Asia-Pacific, said his company owns YouTube and focuses on community standards, insisting on the principle of the independence of users' expression.
"A new video is uploaded on YouTube every minute, with an average combined 400 minutes," he said.
As of late last year, 7.8 million video clips (or 1% of total uploaded videos) were found to violate the community standard. Some 75% of video clips that violated the standard were removed before viewing by the public.
Taimu Negishi, public policy strategist for Line Corporation, said Line places critical importance on its privacy policy for users' chats on its social platform. Every message is encrypted and kept at its operational system headquarters in Japan, which strictly governed by Japanese law.
